Look, I’m a nobody. But my friend suggested I post this exchange so here:
Q. It has been great watching your conviction collecting @XCOPYART pieces. I have primarily focused on genart but am dabbling in 1/1’s. What was the catalyst for your change in collecting?
A. I recently spoke to a great primarily trad art collector (but one who dabbles in digital art too) who expressed her view that the most fulfilling way to collect - and prob the smartest financially - is to go deep on a small number of artists you have high conviction in.
Many positive effects:
- You feel closer to the artist as you own pieces representative of their stylistic evolution over the years.
- You get to know the collector community better. That helps especially if you want to get your hands on a particular piece that isn’t listed, or you want to sell a particular piece for which liquidity is low.
- If you can build a collection that represents a respectable slice of the artist’s career, the collection itself can become valuable provenance to others in the future.
- You are more likely to stumble into opportunities that don’t exist for less focused collectors. For example, XCOPY regularly holds collector raffles for allow lists. All X holders get a ticket; Grifters and holders of low eds (<40) typically get addl tickets. Owning several XCOPYs can go a really long way - I won a Simulacrum for 2 ETH. You also get invited to things, like @thedoomedxyz, that are not available to more casual collectors.
The collector in question wasn’t the first who told me this, but the message resonated with me now. My collection is a fairly good rep of genart, but my most meaningful experiences as a collector have been interacting with the few artists I’ve collected more vigorously.
So I think, going forward, I’m likely to focus more on those artists. Specifically @emilyxxie, @XCOPYART, and @DianeeLindo (a dark stop motion animation genius). And ofc now and then, some works that compliment theirs, to the extent good deals arise.
Q. Why XCOPY in particular?
A. Several reasons:
- I don’t think any other artist embodies cryptoart to the same extent. He gets the dialogue and manages to contribute to it. Consider for example some of his titles and subheadings - “this is clearly money laundering,” “hello admin DM me,” “tech won’t save us” - or his making all his art CC0 and his willingness to collab with other artists, even if they’re unknown.
- Stylistically/philosophically I think he takes the baton from the likes of Basquiat, Warhol, and Banksy, some of my modern faves. Yet everything he puts out - even in the abstract style he’s been experimenting with of late - is immediately recognizable as XCOPY.
- He deserves it. He was putting out daily art on tumblr (thousands - tens of thousands - of separately drawn frames) well before NFTs were a thing, just for the love of art; he sold his first NFTs for pennies; the tech eventually enabled him to monetize.
- He is a real class act. He collects from and collabs with other artists in the space and always tries to do right by his own collectors (eg, recently when someone exploited the Happy Consume contract, he market-bought the unapproved mints and burned them).
- He builds a collector network without diluting people. His use of crypto tech to do this - eg, using Max Pain (itself a brilliant work capturing the casino-like crypto ethos) as a community token and offering burn opportunities - is itself fascinating and artistic.
- He keeps me interested. Is there commentary embedded in his numbering an edition of over 6000 while releasing smaller burn-to-mint eds as unnumbered 1155s? Or in burning something done in his “old style” for something done in his “new style”? Maybe time will tell!
End.
As I said, I’m a nobody. But if you like the way I collect, the above explains my current thinking.